


Or Anyone Like You

by elle_stone



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Nostalgia, Summer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:15:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26759320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: Twenty-two, weightless in the season of the in-between, barely buoyed into adulthood: she spent the summer in a house with long white curtains and a view of the beach. The first time she met him, he was working the cash register at the convenience store four blocks down.Clarke returns to the beach where she spent the summer after college, and sorts through the memories of an old romance.
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin
Comments: 10
Kudos: 40





	Or Anyone Like You

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally written as a series of writing exercises on tumblr, off and on between 2017 and 2020. This version is pretty similar, with some stylistic edits and a few corrections of, for example, timeline errors. The original can be found on my tumblr @kinetic-elaboration, on the tag "anyone like you."
> 
> You can also find a moodboard for this fic on tumblr, [here](https://kinetic-elaboration.tumblr.com/post/630814584688738304/or-anyone-like-you-bellarke-66k-rated-t-summary).
> 
> Inspired by the song Koop Island Blues by Koop ft. Ane Brun.

Twenty-two, weightless in the season of the in-between, barely buoyed into adulthood: she spent the summer in a house with long white curtains and a view of the beach. The first time she met him, he was working the cash register at the convenience store four blocks down. She watched his hands as he rang up her iced coffee and a pack of gum she didn’t even want; she’d grabbed it at the last moment, so she could pretend she wasn’t staring at the freckles across his nose and the strong width of his shoulders and the faded off-green of his old shirt.

His gaze flicked to hers; she looked away. Then back. He was still staring, not smiling, but the corner of his mouth quirked up and when he asked if that was all, a small parade of inappropriate answers crowded in her throat.

She just said yes.

The last time, they stood on the beach in the evening as the water rushed in, low crashes of foaming white-blue over their bare feet. Bellamy behind her with his arms around her waist, nose in her hair. _Bellamy_. Even the name just right for the season, how she whispered it into the summer shadows at night, most nights; foreign, French, the long _lll_ -sound sliding down her tongue. Her tongue, his tongue, fingertips gliding over the muscles of his arms that she first saw in the heat of that low swelter of an afternoon, muscles she’d followed down to his fingers, fingers she’d been staring at when he cleared his throat and she looked up.

She thought about introducing herself, that first time, but didn’t. Perhaps already knowing she’d be seeing him again. The second time he was standing outside the store, leaning back, one hand in his pocket and the other holding a paperback book, the cover of which she could not read. “I’m on break,” he said, as she approached, before she could speak.

“Yeah, I figured.”

“So?”

Like he got this all the time. Tourist girls.

She waited for him to look up, not moving, not speaking. If they’d met in the winter, they’d be meeting in the dark. But the summer sun seemed to have barely shifted from the height of the sky. A bit of her hair had come loose from her messy bun, and it tickled the back of her neck.

“So I’m Clarke,” she answered. “I live just over there. And I’ll be here all summer.”

“Hmmm.” Not a laugh, not mean, but not light either. A down in the dirt sort of huff. He blinked, looked slowly down the length of her and then back up. “Then I guess I’ll be seeing you around.”

*

Ten o'clock on Friday morning and already warm. She stood by the magazine rack, flipping through celebrity gossip, while the fan on the counter behind her whirred, shaking and uneven. It groaned as it stuttered to a stop all the way to the left and then, righting itself, shifted back to life and stumbled on to the right. A blast of blessed cool tickling the hair at the back of her neck, a return of thick low-red heat in its wake. She stared at the paparazzi pictures, eyes gliding over shapes that meant nothing, small-lettered captions that meant nothing. Listened to the fan, and to the conversation at the register.

The only other customer was a boy about her age, and he was standing there just wasting time, telling the cashier with the freckles about this party he was planning to throw, telling him, “Seriously, Bellamy, just come.”

Bellamy. Be _ll_ amy. A name that sounded like a drop of sweat between the shoulder blades. She could hear him sighing, almost groaning, in that deep voice she’d never yet heard say her name, and she all but closed her eyes, trying to picture the expression on his face.

“It’s a party not an expedition into the wilderness. Just come. You come too.”

Clarke looked up from the small stack of glossies she’d collected, surprised for a second to be seen. Neither of her roommates was awake when she left. She had not yet spoken to a soul all day. She had forgotten, without realizing she’d forgotten, that she was a real person and could be seen and spoken to, not just an apparition, floating on the summer sun over the slate gray sidewalks and the squeaking off-yellow linoleum convenience store floors.

Her sandals squeaking against the off-yellow linoleum floors. The chipped red paint on her toes. The stick of her fingers against the glossy magazine covers, held in her hands.

“Yeah, you,” the kid repeated, with a smirk on his face, like he thought he’d embarrassed her and was proud. Like he thought she might be shy. “Who else?”

Clarke took the last two steps toward them, thumped her stack of magazines on the counter, then leaned with one elbow against it and turned to the stranger, appraising him. “Extend an invite to my friends and give me the address and we’ll be there.”

For a second, nothing, uncertainty—then the boy grinned and, pointing to her: “I like her. Now you have to come, man, come on.”

Bellamy rolled his eyes. “Oh sure,” he answered. “Now it’s worth going. It’ll be a riot.”

*

She disembarks directly off the plane onto the tarmac. The air shimmers and waves with early summer heat. Her vision is singed by the direct overhead glare of the sun, which warms her skin, and she’s not at the water yet but she can feel it, calling her home. Yes. Almost there. She pulls her sunglasses down off the top of her head, shakes them free, and slides them up onto her nose with one hand. She can smell the asphalt burning.

 _Home_ this time is a substitute, though not far off from the old house. A new place near the water. In the bathroom a claw foot tub. She’ll have to buy long white curtains for the windows. She’ll have to buy a couple fans because, alone now, the rooms are too quiet, and too stuffy, and the air presses too close.

In the old house, they had no tub, only a grubby shower in the corner of the bathroom. She still remembers the particular rhythm with which she rattled the cream-colored curtain closed. It was the worst room in the place: the floor tiles were cracked and the sink much too tiny for three girls to share and the fan was intermittent at best. She remembers standing forever beneath the shower spray, eyes closed, the room filling slowly with a heavy steam-fog, and how afterward, sitting on the closed toilet lid and fanning her face, airing herself dry, or just waiting for the light-headed feeling to pass, she pretended she was in a little sauna all her own. Raven’s footsteps thundered down the hall beyond the door. Then Maya’s voice calling _Have you seen—?_ and Raven’s hollering back, _Got it. Always._ Clarke rubbed at her face with the back of her hand. Her wet hair hung down her back, dripping, slowly dripping, tiny droplets itching down her skin, and she thought about every muscle and bone, every quiet secret surface of her body, like behind her ear, under her jaw, the crook of her elbow, the arch of her foot.

Even then, not entirely thinking of him, she thought of him. Be _ll_ amy with the long-l right there in the center of his name, maybe already at the party. Maybe waiting for her without knowing he was waiting. Poised and ready to see her and think of the quiet secret hidden surfaces of her. Poised and ready to desire her, as she already—just his hands, the mundane tasks of his hands, scanning a bottle of water and a packet of gum and the stack of glossy magazines that’s spilling out over their kitchen table now, half-read, his hands and his fingers and the topography of muscles in his upper arms and his shoulders—as she already—sweating and blush-red all over and warm, breathing in the heavy heat of the tiny little room—as she already—so desired _him_.

*

The party was a riot.

She wore a short white sundress with a pattern of pale-yellow flowers at the bottom hem, and thin white straps, her hair flowing down over her shoulders. Tall white wedge sandals and a delicate gold necklace she’d borrowed from Maya, with a small flower pendant at the end. (She remembers it now, glinting just so in streetlamp glow–)

“It’s cute,” Maya told her, as they stood shoulder to shoulder in front of the bathroom sink, sharing the mirror. Maya was outlining her lips in pale pink.

“Too cute, though?”

“That depends. What’s this guy like?”

Clarke pushed a strand of hair behind her ear and hesitated on the answer, because she didn’t know, yet—she had some ideas, but she didn’t know.

And at last: “Probably not into too cute.”

But she wore the necklace, and the dress, and the shoes, and her hair down anyway, and they followed Bellamy’s friend’s scrawled pencil directions (he’d written them out on a flyaway card from one of Clarke’s magazines, standing at the checkout while Bellamy tapped one finger against the counter like he was bored) to a part of the beach both fancier and less tourist-choked than their own: a neighborhood of three-story jewel-tone houses with broad veranda porches, spread out in front of them and ghost-lit by the earliest tinges of dusk, enough to make Clarke’s heart ache.

Raven shoved the flyaway card back into the pocket of her ripped-up jeans. “Guess we don’t need this anymore. It’s obviously that one.”

She nodded her head to a teal-colored home spilling out teenagers and kids in their twenties, blasting music. A party house. The center of the scene. They climbed up the porch steps to the propped open door. People they didn’t know watched them, and they pretended they did not perceive themselves being watched.

Inside was louder, more crowded. No sign of the host or of Bellamy, only a blast of sight and sound and the heat of bodies mingling with bodies and breath mixing with breath: what Clarke cannot recall later, because it blends into a haze, because the close press of people and the loud thump of bass cannot be remembered, only felt. They snaked their way past elbows, between groups of strangers talking about strange and unknown things, to the kitchen and then on to the backyard. Except that by then, by the time she stepped out onto the stone step and breathed in the fresh, clear, summer twilight air, Clarke was alone.

*

The backyard was bisected by a flagstone path, lush with potted plants in giant earthenware containers, decorated with haphazard hanging strings of lights. Around the perimeter, a tall fence cut out the neighbors and the rest of the world. So when she saw him, there at the end of the path with his arms folded against his chest and a drink in one hand, smiling, but guarded, nodding along to something the boy next to him was saying, she felt like they were the only two. Like they had met at last in some proper, hidden, secret place. He looked so much more relaxed than at the store. That was what she noticed first. Staring at him lit by the liquid pinks and yellows of the late summer sun, suddenly laughing at some stupid joke, maybe, or story: a dismissive gesture, a roll of his eyes, a half-turn away and then back.

Someone bumped into her from behind. She’d been standing just in front of the door, watching him.

Maybe she exaggerates everything later. Maybe it means too much to remember him just as he was then. Sometimes she wonders if that was really their first meeting, first in the sense that counts, there in Miller’s backyard before she quite even knew who Miller was, the muffled bass beat dripping out into the yard, the grass too long and tickling at her ankles as she walked.

“Who’s this?” the other boy asked, and looked her up and down, like he thought he could intimidate her, didn’t like how she stepped right up to them like she knew them. She gave him a once-over in return. Bellamy elbowed him hard in the ribs.

“Shut up, Murphy.”

“Oh, I see.” He quirked the corner of his mouth up, then took a drink from his own cup, tipping it all the way back. He wasn’t bothered at all, Clarke thought, by the attempt at a shove, because he noticed the shuffle of Bellamy’s shoulders up toward his ears afterward and the way he looked off to the side and then down, and he saw just how much his friend had given away.

Was he embarrassed? Clarke’s tongue tipped against the roof of her mouth, her lips parted, words unsaid.

"I _see_ ,” Murphy was saying, drawing out the vowels on the word. “ _You_ invited the tourist.”

A biting retort, a lie, started to form where her greeting could have gone, but instead she tilted her shoulders back and lifted her chin, and asked, “Am I that obvious?”

“Well, I’ve never seen you around before,” Murphy answered. “And it’s a small town. So… yeah.”

Bellamy exhaled a low, hard breath through his nose, a longer sound he cut off with the click of his teeth. Then he pivoted on his heel toward them.

 _A man who likes to be in control of the conversation_ , Clarke thought. And let her gaze linger on his face.

“Yeah,” he said, “This is—”

“Clarke.” She held out her hand. Murphy eyed it for a moment, wary, then switched his drink to his left hand and shook. “My friends and I are spending the summer nearby. _Your_ friend,” she flicked her gaze to Bellamy again. He was watching her already in return. “He invited us.”

“Miller,” Bellamy filled in. “He throws these parties whenever he gets bored and forgets how much he actually hates people in his house.”

“Bellamy never forgets how much he hates people in his house,” Murphy added, and Clarke nodded sagely.

Mmm, yes, a solitary type, an awkward-in-crowds type, didn’t know what to do with his arms anymore as soon as she came near. But he never turned away when he caught her looking at him, and the look he gave her—

“Oh, I see,” she said. “He’s more a loner.”

Watching him as she said it, voice knowing and low, watching the way he rolled his eyes and the defensive stiffening of his spine, hearing the low, irritated noise he made in his throat.

“Nothing wrong with liking solitude sometimes,” he said.

She shrugged up one shoulder, conceded: “Never said there was,” as light as air. Then she took a step forward, pretending to tip-toe and stretch to see above his shoulder, looking out at the rest of the yard, the rest of the crowd. Her hand on his arm for balance. The soft, true heat of his skin beneath her fingertips. “So where do I need to go to find a drink in this place?”

*

She avoids his old neighborhood and the places they used to go—even though she told herself she was coming here to come home—except for the bar, where they went only once. It has not changed. The one night they visited, Murphy was tending bar and stopped to talk to them sometimes, while they sat across from the door and watched people coming in, alone or together, leaving together. Bellamy’s hand sometimes resting on her leg. This was early. She was wearing jeans and she wondered, if she’d been in a skirt, if he’d had to touch her bare skin, or almost her bare skin, would he have been less bold? Or more so?

Murphy doesn’t work at the bar anymore but the wood of the counter is still scuffed and scratched, and the floor still worn, and the windows still narrow dark rectangles reflecting the patrons back at themselves, after dark. She’s not precisely sure why she’s here. Somehow it seemed easier. Dipping a toe carefully into the way things were, testing the feel and the heat of her memory, instead of walking down the sidewalk past the tiny grocery where they met, waiting for his ghost to flicker into being in the uncertain neon glow of the red OPEN sign—but she’s remembering him harder than she thought she would. If she’s trying to keep the past under her control, it isn’t working.

Clarke slides up onto one of the bar stools and orders the same drink she had then, a screwdriver, which she twirls in staccato movements back and forth with the tips of her fingers. Feels the cold sweat condensing beneath her skin. When she first visited, there was no AC but two fans whirred in opposite corners, clunky and loud, and she’d hold her breath waiting for the next tepid rush of air. Now the whole building is cool and quiet, quiet but for the patrons and the low murmur of conversation, and that’s not much because the place isn’t busy. Early tourist season, and anyway it’s not a tourist place.

She takes her hair down so it will hide her face and pretends that she’s cold in her t-shirt and jeans and boots.

When a man sits next to her, she wonders if it’s Bellamy, somehow: just for a second, a subliminal message of memory, of his low voice telling her about the locals, of his low voice and his hand on her knee. But he’s not. He’s a stranger with dark hair and dark eyes, looking for conversation to head off the slow slide of the late evening into early night, and Clarke lets her fingernail draw a line down the condensation on her glass, slowly, easing through the moment, wondering about him.

He doesn’t look like Bellamy or sound like him, but Clarke feels hollow inside, thinking she could come back here and it would be home, and his presence is enough. He leans in closer. She tucks her hair behind her ear, and smiles.

*

After her new acquaintance has gone to sleep, Clarke slips out of bed, crosses the room, and perches on the windowsill. Her eyes have adjusted to the dim light; she’s getting used to the unfamiliar shapes and shadows in the unfamiliar room. She peeks out through the curtains at the sidewalk and the streetlamp, the fuzzy yellow glow of it through the glass. Behind her, the man she doesn’t really know shifts in his sleep.

She reaches her hand up and rests her palm just below her neck, feeling out the dried sweat of her skin with her fingertips. Searching for the chain of her old necklace, even though she knows it’s not there.

In the spotlight of the streetlight, out in front of Miller’s place. Night-dark and the muffled sounds of the party behind them. She leaned back against the side of the house. Now she can almost conjure the landscape of the uneven slats digging against her shoulder blades. She can almost remember looking up, how she had to look up at him, the angle of her neck: just exactly how much taller than her he was.

And Bellamy leaning over her, leaning with one hand against the side of the house, just above her head, leaning and blocking some of the glow of the light behind them, his features barely visible in the gloom. The flare of the light. She did not reach out and trace his cheekbones, his lips, his nose, not then. But those memories bleed in. He was almost smiling. She stared at him, unblinking, brave, and tested herself: could she read the expression on his face?

She watched him. She knew even then she had to memorize him, his sun-gold skin, the curls in his hair. The night reaching its peak. An electric hum building.

He ran the tip of his finger along the gold chain of her necklace, down to the flower pendant just above the neckline of her dress. Slowly, slowly. Following the pattern of the chain. His touch, sliding along so close to her skin. He was staring at her too, at her face, reading her or memorizing her or wondering about her, maybe. But when he reached the flower, he glanced down, and she saw the flutter in his eyelashes, and she wondered what he was trying not to say.

*

Clarke remembers that they found a spot to themselves, standing by the tall, wooden fence that separated Miller’s yard from his neighbors’. A festive string of lights, like little light bulbs, glowed warm and bright just above Bellamy’s head. When she told him that she was twenty-two, and had just gotten her degree, he seemed surprised, and she was pleased. Then he admitted that he was only two years older, and in and out of college himself. He’d taken some classes, but a lot of time off too—mostly to work, sometimes to travel. He recounted for her bits and pieces of his adventures while she sipped from her red Solo cup. The evening air was warm and soft on her skin.

She remembers some of their conversation: hearing for the first time about his friends, talking about hers, and she thinks she might have spoken of the house by the shore, too, with the low little porch and the rocking chair outside, and of the view from her window, of the ocean waves that crashed there at the edge of the earth, waking her sometimes in the middle of the night. What is more distinct, though, is the memory of the spaces between them. Sometimes a passerby would walk too close to them, and force her to step into his space, or he into hers. In those moments, she felt the sudden heat of imposition, an awkward blush across her cheeks. But most of the time, they existed as if within their own little bubble, not crowded, and it was easy to breathe even when he smiled with just the corner of his mouth. The clarity of the air remained undisturbed, even when she looked up and caught him looking at her, in a pause of conversation, unexpectedly solemn, the first person she’d ever met who looked at her like that. Like he wanted to know her. Whatever she’d been saying, the words grew thick and round on her tongue; she could no longer form them, so instead she slid her index finger back and forth against the grooves in the plastic of her cup, and shook her head to clear it, and swallowed them down.

Later, after the sun finally went down, someone brought out lanterns, someone else turned the music up. Clarke found herself dancing, absently, in place.

“Is this a hint?” Bellamy asked. He was biting back a smile, rolling his eyes. “Am I supposed to ask you to dance with me?”

“No.” The thought hadn’t occurred to her, but still she spat the word out in defiance, like a child. “Wouldn’t dream of it.” She swung her hips, moved her arms, a sort of awkward imitation of the twist. “I’m great at it, though, so—your loss.”

“Yeah, I see that,” Bellamy answered, low, nearly under his breath.

And later, again, they found themselves sitting on the flagstones between two large potted plants. One long, flat leaf batted Clarke on the shoulder. She was sitting cross-legged, her knee touching Bellamy’s knee. Carefully, she balanced her empty Solo cup beneath her fingertips, twirling it around in front of her, skating it along the ground on the edge of its base, while she listened to Bellamy’s voice. His voice soft and low but steady, like the waves at night, through the open window of her room.

And later still, beneath the streetlight, outside the front of the house, her back against the wooden slats and the tip of his finger sliding down the chain of her necklace, down and down. She remembers that her breath stuttered. She remembers balling her hands into fists and then letting them go. She remembers his eyelashes, the curl of his hair in his eyes, the freckles across his cheeks, the flare of light behind him and the distant music from the party, seeping out through the darkness, from the back of the house. She remembers those last moments of waiting, poised for his touch.

*

Is she looking for Bellamy, in the men from the bar? This one has a scattering of freckles across his nose and a constellation of them on his back. Clarke traces them, through the sweat between his shoulder blades, as she listens to his neighbor’s air conditioner thrumming on the other side of the wall. She traces her tongue across her top lip and the sweat clinging there, and lets her eyes narrow, since he can’t see her or the uncertain, thoughtful expression on her face. He seems half-asleep except that when her fingers pause, he tells her not to stop.

“Feels good.”

She lowers herself, slowly, and kisses his shoulder. An open-mouth kiss, her eyes closed, her hair loose and falling to brush against his skin. Slides her hand all the way down his side, thinks about the smooth expanse of skin, the specificity and the anonymity of skin. This man with his face in his pillow, burying a low, deep moan against his pillowcase.

This is an altered state. This, being of and outside herself all at once, how memories overlay the mundane and simple movements of her body, and when she closes her eyes, she’s sure where she is but not when. And this: standing outside the bar, just below the light attached next to the door, listening to the sound of voices, which rises and falls when the door opens and then whines shut again, and to the pattern of footsteps on the sidewalk, and in the distance to the waves crashing hypnotic against the shore.

The waves on the shore. The waves on the shore and the way he knew to pull her back, so that she fell against his broad chest, and he could wrap his arms around her and lean down to kiss her neck: when she thought to herself _I have not been happy since then_ , that was what she missed the most. Is she looking for home in memories that may not ever be again? What she has now are the echoes of them, the imprints of them, soft flutters in her mind and a sense in her stomach that she has been displaced, and a wavy old image that overlays the new, wherever she looks.

She’s standing outside the bar with her back against the side of the building, waiting, without expecting, and above her flies and other small bugs crash and fizz against the bulb.

His fingers reached the flower pendant at the end of her necklace; his thumb slid across the petals and down the stem—she rests her fingers now at the base of her neck, her hand uneasily settled against her own bare skin—and she breathed in, and felt that he could hear the stutter in her breath, not from nervousness but from wanting. He might have kissed her then, but she pulled him down.

—For a moment, her eyes close.

Her fingers tugging at his curls, pulling him down, until he met her in a kiss more teeth than lips, dropped the necklace and she remembers how it fell against the bare skin above her chest and then how he wrapped an arm around her waist, and tugged her in. When he kissed her a second time the movement was soft, and slow. She collapsed against him. A tiny noise, a hum, lost between kisses. Finding her breath between kisses. Her own touch softened, lost its urgency, and the most violent of its need; instead a low simmering flame in her and in the settled weight of his hands on her, in the slow movements of his mouth against hers.

And now.

The sounds from inside the bar, too loud and harsh, cresting like waves behind her, wake her—

*

The day after the party, she went looking for him at the convenience store, but he wasn’t there. And she felt dumb. She’d been so certain she’d catch sight of him, from her vantage point behind the display case of chips, making change for a customer or flipping through a magazine, perhaps, or leaning against the countertop and staring into space, as the table fan behind him drifted back and forth and ruffled the curls across his forehead with an artificial breeze. Just as she’d found him on the first day that they met.

Instead, some kid she’d never seen before, maybe all of fifteen, was checking a woman’s ID, a red and white packet of cigarettes on the counter between them.

Clarke hid away behind the bread before he could notice her, then slipped out just as another customer came in, the bell above the door jingling with her retreat. Outside, high-noon sun beat down from a clear and pale-blue sky. She gathered her hair back into a messy bun and grabbed the sunglasses that she’d tucked into the neckline of her shirt.

They’d walked home together the night before, not holding hands or even touching, because Raven and Maya were with them. No one had asked why Bellamy was there, and even at the time, the same part of her that had wanted his arm slung around her shoulders and their loping footsteps staggering side by side had wondered if, at the door, he might try to invite himself in. If he was looking for an after party, or only reluctant to say goodnight. By then, the hour had turned so late that the sky had started to pale and the stars to fade. Their steps were slow and heavy, struggling through the sand along the beach.

Every now and then, she’d glanced at him, his hands in his pockets, his gaze downturned, the backdrop an intermittent curl of dark waves cresting along the shore.

Almost no one had been out, then, but when she returned home from the store, the beach was busy with people: sunbathing, swimming, setting up a volleyball game on the sand in front of her neighbors’ house. And there was Bellamy, too, pacing along next to the sidewalk in front of the homes, squinting up at them, against the sun.

She stopped short, not because she did not believe what she was seeing but because she did not think she should believe, and because she wanted to memorize the moment, sink deep into it, enjoy herself in it.

Then she took off her sunglasses and stared at him again.

Only when he turned, about to examine the next house along the way, and caught sight of her, did she raise her arm and wave. “Hey,” she called, making her way toward him, stumbling again in the uncertainty of the sand. “What are you doing here?”

“I remembered the neighborhood,” he answered, with an awkward half-shrug, as they came even with each other. “But not the house. Wasn’t sure which one was you.”

“We’re the white one on the corner.”

“Right, yeah.” He looked briefly over his shoulder, then turned back. The white house with the porch swing. He’d walked up the steps with them, said goodnight to Raven and Maya as they went in, then lingered. Kissed her again beneath the porch light, briefly, and then was gone. “Guess I should have remembered that.” And then, in the half-beat of silence, before she could respond, “I hope you don’t mind me stopping by.”

Did she mind—a light and airy bubble was threatening to burst within her chest. She did not recognize it at the time: a new type of happiness, waiting to be named.

She smiled. “Not at all.”

*

Whenever they spoke of the future, she was reminded that she would lose him, and someday soon. They sat on the porch swing out in front of the little white house on the corner, Clarke leaning with all of her weight against Bellamy’s chest, and his arms around her, and his cheek pressed against her hair so she could feel his breath against her ear. Through the long, slow evenings, they counted the first stars as they appeared in the lavender sky; they listened to the waves.

The waves—they still keep her up nights, now.

He had a new job on the coast, starting in September, and she’d be starting med school in the city. They’d found each other in a comma, the slightest pause in her life, maybe in his. The movement of the water, searching up over the sand, was hypnotic, beautiful. She could smell the ocean. Salt air and the sea.

“Wouldn’t it be funny if you asked him to come with you?” Raven suggested, as if hilarity were the answer here, as Clarke washed strawberries in the sink. She was sitting at the kitchen island, flipping through one of Clarke’s magazines. She couldn’t see the way Clarke was scowling at the wall.

“It _would_ be romantic,” Maya agreed, wistful and soft. And then, with more weight, “But not practical.”

“I know it’s not practical,” Clarke answered, dumping the berries out into a bowl. Invite him home, to her little apartment, and then—keep him like a souvenir, while she studied, hang him up like a photograph on the wall of her room? He wouldn’t find even the suggestion funny. When he talked about the fall, it was always as if they were each alone there in the coming blistering cold wind. He spoke not as if the season were an epilogue, but as if they two now, drifting back and forth to the rhythm of the ocean waves and the creak of the swing itself, were in a prologue. An odd little prologue, predicting nothing, going nowhere.

She felt his hand settle, warm and heavy, along her stomach, fingers playing lightly with the edge of her shirt.

To think that the slow, endless days would eventually run dry, that each one was already that much shorter than the last, and she would leave him, and she would in the end be the one to leave, caused a well of sadness, already nostalgia-tinged, to rise up like a hard stop in her throat.

“No use thinking about running out of time,” Bellamy said once, in answer to nothing, as if sensing a calcifying, bitter anger in her touch. Anger at problems that could not be solved. The worst ones. “That doesn’t help anyone.”

She twisted around in his arms, traced the curve of his eyebrow with her fingertip. “You are surprisingly wise.”

“Oh, hidden depths,” he answered, smiling, and she followed the line of his smile, too, with a soft touch. “Hidden depths, Clarke, you don’t even know.”

Now on nights when she doesn’t go out, she sits on the windowsill in the bathroom, feeling a sticky, humid heat rising around her, collecting on her skin. No fan on and only stillness and quiet, and the intermittent sound of traffic outside the open window, down below her in the street. She tilts back her head, closes her eyes, curls her toes around the window ledge. Traces her own collarbone with her fingertips. She’s wearing the same sort of slip she wore on the first night he woke up in her bed. She heard him moving in the middle of the night. Leaned up on her elbows to watch him only when she was sure he had already stood, and turned away from her, and wasn’t looking.

She thought perhaps he was leaving. _Hidden depths, Clarke_ —vast unknowns. But he only paced toward the window and stood looking out at the narrow alleyway between her house and the next, stood there and stared for a long time, as she curled in around her pillows and watched him. Whether he was imagining staying or going, following her or leaving, she never asked. She still doesn’t know.

*

Bellamy.

The summer romance. The one who got away.

He shows up in her dreams sometimes, still, representing regret and paths not taken. Each dream is different from the next, and yet the tenor of each is the same. He loves her still, and she is striving to love him too, and to say yes to him, this time. She wakes and the dream always lingers.

Now that the past has receded far enough away, gilded and ideal, she can imagine that she was truly and perfectly happy then, and that it was in her power to be just that way, always. And everything in the present seems only a dull compromise instead. A life she chose when she thought it was the only choice. How romantic to pretend now that it was not.

She sinks down into the warm water of the bath she’s drawn herself, and reads the book he gave her, on the day before she left. The light of early evening streams first pink and gold through the window, then in dusty twilight lavenders and blues, until at last she is reading by the single bulb that hangs from the ceiling, and her water has gone cold. She marks her place with a torn bit of notepaper, then sets the book carefully aside, on the radiator by the window, where it won’t get wet. She takes her hair down and lets it fall over her shoulders. The ends dip down into the water. She listens to the splash of the water as she moves her legs, walking her feet up the inside of the porcelain tub until she can see the chipped red paint of her toenails peeking above the surface.

The sounds of the water in the tub are very small, careful crests and falls of sound, the tiniest of waves. Here she is sunk beneath her own sea. On her first evening back on the coast, she walked down to the shore and watched the sunset, flaring and brilliant over the horizon, and then stayed there with her bare feet planted in the uneven sand and stared up at the first stars, the sky turning pale, deepening to blue, to black. She listened to the waves as they approached her and then receded, and wondered if they had always been this loud, or the enormity of the ocean quite so overwhelming, if she and Bellamy, together, had ever felt this small.

And she wondered then, as she wonders now, if he’s out there somewhere searching for her too, or someone who reminds him of her: the girl of his recurring dreams, the symbol, the bit of a perfect summer past that will never leave him. Has she gotten under his skin?

She sinks low beneath the water, tilting her head back against the rim of the tub, and stares at the browning amoeba-shaped stain on the ceiling. Every night she spent in the little white house in the corner, was a night she spent dwarfed by the ocean, a night she spent small in a small town with desires as riotous and as unruly as the water, and as mysterious to her even then, and their depths as unknown.

When she first returned, she thought perhaps she might find him, still here, older now and wiser, perhaps someone who could grow with her, and not apart. The fantasy of herself at twenty-two. A romantic moment she allows herself, out here, alone now, at the edge of the sea.

She holds her breath and sinks beneath the surface. When she rises up again, she swipes the water from her face, and takes a deep breath, and then she pulls the plug out from the drain and lets the water go.


End file.
